Ascending Open Virtualization Alliance aims to bolster KVM usage

The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) recently announced it has increased its membership by adding 134 new members, bringing the group’s total to more than 200 members since its formation back in May of this year. That’s a 20-fold increase in membership since its launch, signaling a strong growth of interest in KVM’s core technology and a growing number of companies hungry to partner and build an ecosystem of solutions around an open source platform.

According to a recent member survey, more than 50 percent of OVA members are focused on cloud computing in their day-to-day businesses, with virtualization being a key enabling component of the cloud. The group also announced that many of its new members come from emerging markets in Asia and Latin America.

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In case you aren’t already familiar with the OVA, it is a consortium committed to promoting KVM’s (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) open source virtualization platform as an alternative to proprietary and more expensive hypervisor solutions currently on the market. The group’s goal is to increase the adoption of and confidence in KVM-based options through marketing campaigns and the hosting of industry events. And its founding members include such heavy hitters as BMC Software, HP, IBM, Intel, and Red Hat.

The group knows that KVM usage is increasing, but it still barely tips the scales when compared to the market share owned by VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix.

However, unlike these other three platforms, KVM does have a number of advantages being touted by the OVA. For one, KVM is open source technology that is found as part of the Linux kernel. And that makes its price quite competitive. The speed of innovation with open source development is another attractive attribute for KVM. Because so many developers work on open source offerings, the technology can advance itself very quickly.

The OVA is also touting other technology advances in KVM. The hypervisor is establishing a footprint with leading virtualization benchmark performance results. For example, of the 17 SPECvirt 2010 benchmark results published at spec.org, 10 were achieved using KVM technology, including the highest performance benchmark overall and the highest number of performant virtual machines running on a single host.

In addition to performance, security within virtualization has become a major focal point. The hypervisor uses Security-Enhanced Linux, developed by the U.S. National Security Agency. It is this high level of security that appeals to organizations around the world, including many cloud providers. With hardened security features already built into the platform, companies can spend less time and money on virtualization security tools.

However, one piece of the KVM puzzle that is still missing is the lack of a complete management environment. But this is also a great opportunity for the growing OVA list of third-party member companies. Much like what happened within VMware’s own ecosystem very early on, this should prove to be a thriving area for KVM’s ecosystem to line up and start supplying those missing pieces of the puzzle. Tradition systems management vendors such as BMC, CA, HP, and IBM are already members of the OVA and can be assumed ready to bring similar management features to the KVM hypervisor as they have done with VMware.

VKernel, a recent addition to the Open Virtualization Alliance, is also a longtime VMware ecosystem partner that has created numerous software applications to help enhance and ease the management burden of VMware environments. But the company has been expanding those products lately to become less dependent on VMware’s hypervisor and to become more heterogeneous by announcing additional support for other virtualization platforms such as Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM. The company told InfoWorld that this decision to move toward supporting KVM technology has been driven by customer demand.

According to Bryan Semple, the chief marketing officer at VKernel, there are a couple of factors out there making the world more hypervisor agnostic these days, including:

• Application affinity for a specific hypervisor. Some applications will just more easily operate with a specific hypervisor for a variety of reasons. ISV support for a hypervisor, go to market packaging, technical scalability.
• The hypervisor of record to support all virtual desktops is far from decided. As many organizations deploy virtual desktops, non-VMware solutions will increase.
• Pricing, taxes, and vendor lock in. The VMware vTAX debacle really woke people up to being single sourced around one vendor for their hypervisor.
• Management rules. If you own the management stack, the hypervisor gets even more commoditized. Microsoft has more of footprint in the management space than VMware. Microsoft’s heterogeneous management capabilities will help drive Hyper-V but also heterogeneous environments in general.
• Linux purity. If Linux runs through your blood, why would you allow a proprietary hypervisor into your environment? Linux purists will look to KVM.

Semple went on to say, “These factors will drive more and more heterogeneity in the data center. And VKernel thinks it is important to support these customers, especially the Linux purists. Hence, joining the OVA is a logical implementation of our multi-hypervisor strategy.”

Semple added that there are a lot of Linux admins out there who don’t like the thought of having to use a proprietary hypervisor in their open environments. In his opinion, KVM supported by the OVA will see rapid adoption in these environments.

Despite the success that the OVA is currently having signing up new partners, the group still remains in an uphill battle. VMware currently dominates the server virtualization market with somewhere between 75 to 80 percent of the market under its control. But Microsoft isn’t sitting idly by. Competition out of Redmond may again be heating up with the recent announcements around Hyper-V 3.0 and Microsoft Windows 8 Server, which doesn’t make KVM’s goal of advancement any easier.

With KVM still being a dark horse in this race, the OVA and its 200 members strong may be exactly what this hypervisor technology needs in order to shine a spotlight on itself to help gain greater market acceptance from companies who may not yet be aware of the hypervisor’s capabilities and offerings. On the other hand, if Red Hat and the newly formed group aren’t careful, KVM could slip and become just another Xen story in the world of hypervisors.

This article, “Ascending Open Virtualization Alliance aims to bolster KVM usage,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.